A new proposal was published for creating an HTML attribute that can be helpful for notifying crawlers what part of a web page is generated by AI. The proposal is quickly becoming relevant because of new rules coming into effect in Europe this summer, but some are questioning whether this is the right solution to that problem.
AI Disclosure
The proposal was created by David E. Weekly (LinkedIn profile), who noted that there are currently proposals that provide a more general signal that an entire web page is AI generated but nothing that labels only a section of a web page in a page that is otherwise authored by a human.
Weekly’s proposal acknowledges the reality that many web pages are partially AI generated. One example is the AI generated summaries of news content. The proposal specifically mentions news sites that contain a sidebar with AI generated summaries.
The proposal suggests creating an HTML attribute that can be applied at the section level using the <aside> HTML element, which is one of the core elements of Semantic HTML. It’s a an interesting way to leverage an existing semantic HTML element.
Weekly explains how it solves a problem:
“A news article page might contain a human-written investigation alongside an AI-generated summary sidebar. Existing approaches only support page-level disclosure (the <meta> tag proposed in whatwg/html#9479) or HTTP response-level signals (IETF draft-abaris-aicdh-00). Neither allows marking individual sections of a page, which is what 42+ commenters on the WHATWG issue identified as the key missing capability.
The EU AI Act Article 50 (effective August 2026) requires machine-readable marking of AI-generated text content, creating regulatory demand for exactly this kind of standard.”
The Aside Element
The <aside> HTML element is designed for marking off sections of content that are not a part of the main content. The <aside> element can be used for a “related articles” section and it could also be used around a block of content that is advertising (because it’s not a part of the main content). The way that is accomplished is by the use of an HTML attribute which semantically describes what that block of content is.
The definition of the <aside> element is:
“The <aside> HTML element represents a portion of a document whose content is only indirectly related to the document’s main content. Asides are frequently presented as sidebars or call-out boxes.”
So the use of the <aside> element kind of makes sense for the context of AI generated content although an argument can be made that in the context of content summaries generated by AI fits into the flow of the content and thus it can’t be <aside>, because <aside> is only semantically correct when the content is indirectly related to the document’s main content.
So, is this an imperfect solution in the context of an AI generated summary that is directly related to the document’s main content? I think it may be. Nobody in the GitHub discussion brings up this obvious disconnect in the use of the <aside> element in the context of an AI authored summary.
The core rule of the <aside> element is that it should contain tangential or supplementary information. A summary, by definition, is a condensed version of the main content. Whether the summary is AI-generated or human-written doesn’t change the semantic role on the page.
Not A Settled Proposal
There is a lively conversation going on in the GitHub repository for the proposal. One of the purposes of the <aside> elements relates to accessibility. The last comment on the proposal calls attention to the fact that the proposal is meant to satisfy a legal requirement but not solve an issue related to the web.
They wrote:
“I’ve reviewed the proposal and the surrounding discussion, including the arguments in favor and against. However, the more I read, the more uncertainty I have about the practical necessity of introducing additional markup at the platform level. At the moment, this approach seems primarily aimed at satisfying formal or regulatory requirements, without a clearly demonstrated benefit for the web ecosystem as a whole.”
The takeaway is that the commenter sees the proposal as compliance-driven markup that platforms would be expected to add even when it does not clearly improve the web itself, and that concern becomes sharper if the implementation pushes disclosure into existing semantic HTML elements like <aside> in cases where the disclosed content is a part of the main flow.
